The present invention relates to an improved audio, video, and/or image system with enhanced functionality.
In the current information age viewers are bombarded by vast amounts of video information being presented to them. The video information may be presented to the viewer using many devices, such as for example, broadcast television, cable television, satellite broadcasts, streaming video on computer networks such as the World Wide Web, and video from storage devices such as compact discs, digital video discs, laser discs, and hard drives. People generally view video content in a passive manner with the interaction limited to interactivity typically found on a VCR. Depending on the source of the video and the viewing device, the viewer may have the ability to fast forward, fast reverse, stop, pause, and mute the video. Unfortunately, it is difficult for the viewer to locate specific information within a video or summarize a video without the time consuming task of viewing large portions of the video.
Existing digital libraries may incorporate techniques that attempt to process the video to create a summary of its content. However, the existing digital library techniques process selected frames as a whole in order to characterize the content of the video. For example, color histograms of selected frames may be used to describe the content of the frames. The resulting color histograms may be further summarized to provide a global measure of the entire video. The resulting information is associated with the respective video as a description thereof. Unfortunately, it is difficult to identify and characterize objects within the image, such as Jeff playing with a blue beach ball on the beach.